Break Week 6
Greetings devoted readers.
I’m afraid I will disappoint many of you this week. I have almost nothing to report.
I did spend another day on campus working on the plastic shredder again, but only one, as Monday was Victoria Day, a holiday that causes places (like college campuses) to be closed. And on the day I was on campus there wasn’t much to be done on the shredder. We need a bunch of parts yet, and without them deep assembly is pointless. But I did figure out the specifics about how the shredder chamber itself assembles, and got a couple of details on that worked out. With luck, this coming week we’ll do some portion of the actual, final assembly. I need luck, though, because at the moment I have a nasty cold/flu thing that I really don’t want to spread around. It’s awful, and if I am still in bad shape on Monday I will not be going in.
I also haven’t managed to make any art this past week. Not being at my best and not sleeping well (for which I blame a particular dog who shall not be named, but who is much larger than her name implies) mean that picking up sharp objects to carve wood is a bad (and risky) idea. I didn’t even manage to photograph the dogs, as was requested last week. Sorry, Lori. Soon, I hope.
What did happen this week — on Victoria Day, in fact, when most Canadians seem to be having a BBQ or going out and doing something energetic outdoors — was the swap of my “office” (the room with my computer in it) and the guest room. That was an entire day of disassembling heavy things, moving said heavy things up and down stairs, and putting those same heavy things back together in different places. Whee. Not exactly exciting from anyone’s perspective, alas.
The sad truth is I have very little left to tell you. Not quite nothing, but very little.
Here’s a thing that amused me: I found an article on Ars Technica about wireless keyboards. Given my recent keyboard woes, I wondered if it would suggest a good wireless keyboard that would address my concerns. Rather astoundingly, though, Ars completely failed to discuss the security issues around wireless keyboards. The words “security” and “encryption” never show up in the article. Not once. But at least a couple of reader comments pointed out the oversight. No response from Ars that I can see, though, so their tech reporting quality has gone down a couple of notches in my opinion. See for yourself if you like:
The only other thing of interest this week falls squarely into…
Harbour News
That’s right. Apparently we’re very close (three days away from) a strike by the workers that load and unload ships in the harbours here. And this is the big port city of Canada, here. All the cargo to and from China, among other places, goes through Vancouver. The economic impact of a strike might be huge, it seems to me.
An interesting tidbit is that the harbour I regularly cross is the smaller harbour from the perspective of container ships, with the port in the town of Delta handling more traffic. I had to use Google Maps to find it (and I leave that as an exercise for the interested reader) but it’s interesting to see where that port is situated.
Anyway, that’s really it this week. Ugh. So sorry! I will try to better next week, I promise. Though, honestly, if this disease doesn’t let up I will have spent another week impersonating a slug.